Author Archives: aides memoires

Versailles: Science and Splendour

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I’m not sure I’ve ever been in the Science Museum before; if I have, I would have been a child. (I’ve definitely been in the Natural History Museum, but not for over 50 years. Maybe it’s time for another visit.)

This exhibition was about science and bling – what you can do if you are an absolute ruler with vast resources at your disposal. Thanks to Jean Plaidy, I already had a general idea of the generation-hopping longevity of the last three Louis – Louis XIV (1643-1715), his great-grandson Louis XV (1715-1774) and his grandson, Louis XVI (1774-1792). They were great promoters of science and technology as well as the arts. Their reigns cover the Enlightenment and the publication of the Encyclopédie (1751-1772), and I came away with the impression that everybody at that time was discussing Newton’s Principia (1687), looking through gilded telescopes (1750) and ticking off what they could see from Cassini’s map of the moon (1679).

I don’t mean to be facetious. With their immense wealth and power, they were like the pharaohs of Egypt; instead of pyramids, Louis XIV constructed Versailles and its far-stretching gardens – all of which required accurate measurements and engineering. How else could you ensure that the two octagonal pools, 1.7km apart, would appear to be the same size to the king when he looked out of his palace window? Entirely frivolous – but knowledge and skill combined with human labour to make it work. Channels were constructed in the Seine to feed the monstrous Marly Machine to take water uphill to the Versailles fountains: ditto. Horology was crucial – not just for timepieces but to calculate latitude and longitude on the long sea voyages that kept the French empire close. Cassini was enticed from Italy to become the director of the Paris Observatory; he spent eight years observing the moon and to produce his map. He and his descendants also produced a map of France, and it was fascinating to see the triangles stretched across the land to ensure its accuracy. Thinking of Cassini, though, reminded me how knowledge is often in flux and needs constant checking: he began his work at a time when the heliocentric theory was still debatable, and, for all his brilliance in his other discoveries, he was the originator of the suggestion that Venus might have a moon.

Botany and zoology flourished at Versailles. Louis XV was presented with an Indian rhinoceros in 1769 – and here it was (stuffed; another victim of the French Revolution). There were fashions for plants, with Madame de Pompadour popularising Turkish hyacinths, but there was also scientific analysis and recording. Surgery was progressing: there was a display of the slender scalpel that Louis XIV’s surgeon developed to treat an anal fistula along with the small device that looked like an instrument of torture to ensure . . . no, really too much information. But it does bring home to you the uncomfortable reality of how advances are made. (The surgeon “practised” on a few dozen unfortunates with the same condition. Presumably most of his later patients at least must have survived for him to have the confidence to go ahead and tackle the king.) There was a life-sized hand-sewn model of a womb and foetus for the training of midwives: it looked like the kind of doll that a mother might sew for her daughter – which, under the circumstances, seemed appropriate.

The Postcard by Anne Berest

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I don’t generally read novels about the Holocaust, but this one was lent to me and I felt the weight of an “ought to”. For me, the Dairy of Anne Frank in my teenage years and Primo Levi later were enough, although I understand why authors still write them – particularly in this case, where the story concerns the author’s relatives. It’s very readable: poignant and gripping. I was stopped in my tracks by thoughts that reading it inspired: to be “outsidered” when you think you are “one of us”.

Troutbeck

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I’ve been meaning to see the Burne-Jones windows in Jesus Church for years and today I finally did so. A walk from Windermere to Troutbeck via Wain Lane and Robin Lane, then to Orrest Head via Longmire Road. Tufted ducks on Middlerigg Tarn, wigeon by Causeway Farm. A pair of Thirlmere gates on either side of Wain Lane: I had almost forgotten my discovery of Thirlmere gates and siphon wells so was pleased to be reminded of them. Little streaks of snow still on the tops, but by the time I reached Orrest Head it was too hazy for the big view. All in all, a very satisfying day.

Leeds

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Over Christmas I’d watched Alan Bennett’s play “Sunset Across The Bay” from 1975 on BBC iPlayer. There’s a short scene of the bus passing City Square and the old man remembering when the statues were seen as “right rude”. (Heavens, how dirty the Queens Hotel was then! And the nymphs have moved around.) I’ve always rather liked the statues and I’d noticed that there were a few more barely-clothed figures around, so I looked out for them on my walk to the University.

The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery has had a change since I last visited. I was oddly taken by the work of Judith Tucker – insignificant, commonplace landscapes that are very familiar and deserve more attention. Then a painting by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham that – despite being “Untitled” – struck me (after a night at the opera) as representing three cellists. Even though I knew it wasn’t, I still stuck to it. And there was a figure by Bernard Meninsky, whom I’d come across in Hull. Not inspiring, but I can add him to my mental list. (Matthew Smith and Jacob Epstein were there too, looking very Smithy and Epsteiny.)

Love Life

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Well I certainly didn’t expect to find a link between The Travelling Players and this exuberant musical, but I did: Brechtian devices.

Music is by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. It’s a “concept musical” – no plot to speak of, but a theme runs through it. The theme here was marriage: a single marriage stretched across a century and a half, seen against the economic and social forces of the time. In 1791 everything seems simple and homespun: love, a home, a livelihood, neighbours. Perhaps there is a sense that life could be “more”, but circumstances make it implausible until industrialised progress arrives. Then come factories, taking the husband out of the house for long periods each day. Then come railways, taking him away for long periods each year. Then all the opportunities of the twentieth century . . . to become a hustler, a consumer, a self-fulfilment machine. And what about her? Always at home or demanding a vote and a career? And when the career is really just a job that tires you out by the time you return home – what then?

The musical was framed in a vaudeville show, with each act as a kind of Zeitgeisty Greek chorus. It also ensured that it was great fun. How can you not warm to a male octet singing jauntily about progress or a male quartet on economics? Had the audience known the words, they would surely have joined in with the Women’s Club Blues! The orchestra was up on stage as the backdrop, and I began to think of the conductor as a big band leader.

The Travelling Players (1975)

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Director Theo Angelopoulos

Having just seen one film from the Mediterranean made at the tail-end of a repressive regime and looking back on recent history, I thought I’d try another.

Both films were slow, but The Travelling Players beat The Spirit of the Beehive hands down in that respect. I realised how beautiful and human the latter was as I sat through the chilly scenes of a Greece filmed in grey and beige and inhabited by what seemed like marionettes. (That day’s paper had a feature on holidays in Greece with clichéd azure skies and golden beaches; Angelopoulos drained such scenes of all colour.) The camera was sometimes very, very still and sometimes pensively surveyed its surroundings, looking at everything in turn.

It was a film steeped in Greekness. The troupe’s play was “Golfo the Shepherdess”, a bucolic tragedy performed in traditional dress. The manager was betrayed by his wife’s lover; both the wife and her lover were later killed by her son, Orestes, with the assistance of his sister, Electra. Greece itself was betrayed by the Allies after the first and second world wars (and, implicitly, during the rule by the junta). Fortunately I knew enough Greek history to make some sense of the film, and on three occasions characters broke the fourth wall to give a brief account of, say, the Smyrna catastrophe. The viewpoint was very left wing; the British didn’t come out well from any of these little history lessons, and there was a minor revolt as American music drowned out the Greek accordion at a Greek-American wedding feast.

The style was detached: characters were generally seen in long shot, framed in or dwarfed by their surroundings. The film’s prologue was the accordionist’s prologue from the play. Sometimes the camera lingered on a street while the years moved forwards or backwards: thus 1952 became 1939 without a scene change. Often I had the impression of a stage set – particularly for the civil war scenes of street fighting, where opposing groups of fighters advanced and retreated across the “stage” like gangs of rod puppets or shadow puppets (Karaghiozis?). There were repetitions on a theme: Golfo’s fear of the shadow of a man had echoes in several scenes of shadowy figures seen to one side. I found no humour or lightness, but there was a surreal quality at times – the snowy hen hunt, for example – which might have passed for humour. The film’s beginning was its ending: the reformed troupe arrives once again in Aegio after 13 years.

Everyone agrees that the film is a masterpiece, so I shan’t demur. I found it austere and unyielding, like the gaze of the military busts you find in Greek town and village squares – but interesting withal. I created my own pleasure in lapping up what had once been such familiar sights to me: whitewashed stone buildings, double wooden doors, terracotta roofs and akroteria, periptera, ankle-twisting pavements, painted signs, railway station architecture . . . oh, everything.